


A Gryphon at Girton

by oonaseckar



Category: Bones (TV), Lord Peter Wimsey - Dorothy L. Sayers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, Education, Education for women, F/M, Feminism, Feminist Themes, Gen, Higher Education, Magic, Magical Realism, Oxbridge, Oxford, Oxford College, Post-War, Suffragism, Women's College, Women's Rights, scholarship, suffragette
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25188577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: Temperance Brennan: studying at Oxford in the early 20th century, in a world where the supernatural is a part of life - and studied as part of the Supernatural Sciences.Yep, Girton is Cambridge.  Alliteration takes priority over all other considerations.
Relationships: Seeley Booth/Temperance Brennan
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

“A death in the college, my love. So inconsiderate. They never do make any allowance for the staff wanting to get on with the rooms and get done before any incidents, or ceremonies. And this just the same. Which is why I'm late, and although I'm sorry to trouble you, I must trouble you to vacate just for ten minutes or so, lovey. I'll be quick as I can, but I can't leave your spiderwebs in the corner or the potions on the bookshelf, else old Spinnock'll have my guts. You do see, love?”

And Temperance did see perfectly, that Moates, one of the ladies who _did,_ in her wing of the college, one of the new and less reputable women's colleges at Cambridge after the war, was het up and inclined to chat and not to be trifled with. And also, that an incident was an incident was an incident, as far as Moates was concerned, whether it was a graduation ceremony, caps and gowns and scrolls ahoy, or an abrupt and shocking murder. Indeed, Temp had seen Moates more disturbed by now over a spilt cocoa or a brassiere left to dry out the window. Perhaps not surprisingly: they were more intimately concerned with her own day-to-day duties.

Therefore, despite the clear request, Temperance made no move to actually exit from her college rooms while Moates gave them a quick wash and brush-up. Merely, she moved out of the way as necessary as Moates gave the place a bit of spit and polish, politely listened to her continuing monologue, and occasionally interjected.

“Yes, Miss Brennan, that's quite right,” was her response, to Temp's first question on the subject. “Provost Bells, it is, and they found him in the Archaeology section of the library. Near as shocking as if it was our own Provost, but thankfully far as I know Dr. Saroyan is taking breakfast after church and before her appointment to assist the constabulary with their inquiries, much according to her usual routine. Barring the constabulary, of course.”

And she was talking back over her shoulder as she said it, standing on a little footstool the better to get up at the corner of the ceiling with her feather duster. Which was alarming, and must be stopped forthwith. Temp leapt forward, and engaged in the battle they waged on a regular basis. “Oh, Moates, please no! Please! You know that I need them for my Spring term treatise and experiments. And besides. The mum's just had her babies. Have a heart, do.”


	2. Chapter 2

And Moates tugged at her pinny where it was riding up, her pleasantly sagging middle-aged face patient, if a little exasperated. But she halted her feather duster in the middle of its jab of death.

“You girls, miss,” Moates said sadly. “Every one of you, practically, with livestock I really ought to report to the Provost in your rooms. Miss Wick's mice, Miss Montenegro up on the third floor has a chameleon, for her artist's palette, so she says. Miss Warren has some moths hatching, though she thinks I don't know it. And Dr Burley has a gryphon.”

“A gryphon!” Temperance said, quite startled, it had to be admitted.

“Well, miss,” Moates conceded, “that's what it is as far as I know. It's not as if I'm familiar with anything more exotic than cats and dogs, barring the cockatoo my Granda used to keep. Swore a blue streak, that bird did. And put a hex on you if you didn't fill its waterbowl quick enough. Very magical birds, cockatoos. And my sister's goats, creatures of the devil they are – not magical, just mean-spirited. But what I mean to say, miss, _I'm_ supposed to clean these rooms, and _you're_ not supposed to keep livestock. Not even spiders.”

And she looked again at the corner of the ceiling, where the large, plump resident British house-spider had set up home, and sighed wistfully. Perhaps she jabbed just a little bit, for form's sake, in that direction, with her trusty pink-feathered artillery weapon. But she conceded the battle, for now.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> English Bones.

“Thank you, Moates!” Bones said, relieved. “I really do need the extra cobwebs for my class on _Alchemical Transformations of the Golden Age._ But it's only until next week. By then I'll have enough, and the young 'uns should have moved out.” She nodded in the direction of mama-bear spider, and Moates noticed the faint shift and heave of a pregnant bulge about the horrid thing. With a flinch, she got down off the footstool.

“One week, then, miss,” she said, admitting defeat. “But what I still say is, they should never have let you young ladies have magical classes along with the men. S'not ladylike, see. _English literrratuur_ I can understand –- _poetry_ and all of that. Nice. Pretty. Even medicine –- looking after sick people, that's womanly. But all of this nasty faffing about with dangerous spirits and funny-looking animals, with horns and wings and whatnot, the chanting and the incense and the licensed powers –- that's _men's_ business, miss, like war or cricket. And better left to 'em. Just my two penn'orth, miss.”

And she moved on to the washroom, but she did not cease to talk, since that was a rare enough occurrence to merit a mention in both St. Sybil's individual college journal, and in Isis itself. “Did you know Provost Bells yourself, Miss? I've never done for him, though I worked in Pembroke college for a time before I had my two kids and then came back for the morning shift. Moody gentleman, if you'll excuse me saying so, Miss.”

(Bones did not know why she might be expected, or in a position, to excuse Moates from saying so. Except perhaps that most of the skivvies seemed to lump all persons associated with the academic life of the colleges –- lecturers, professors, administrative staff, principals and vice-principals, post-grads and teaching assistants, and students male and female –- all in together in one great big bag of dirty washing, as 'them'. Class, gender and race seemed to make little difference: certainly Bones herself was hardly a blue-blooded sprig of the aristocracy. Daddy still had a whiff of the prison-yard about him, even, though his business was turning over in the black adequately enough, since he'd turned respectable. And Granda had had been up from the proletariat properly: starting out as a millhand at fifteen, he'd chewed baccy and spat it until the day he died, two years back, much mourned and still as rough, blasphemous and horny-handed as he'd been when he'd used his savings from working as a pub manager to send Bones off to the big college. Bones herself, even, was not quite RP, her accent not completely ironed out by boarding school and elocution lessons insisted on by her nice, genteel, Sunday-school-teaching Mamma. But then, a Harrogate boarding school – Miss Frigga's Elocutionary for Genteel Young Ladies of a Gifted Bent – wasn't exactly _Cheltenham Ladies' College_. Fifteen guineas a term, just the same, though.)


	4. Chapter 4

“Well,” Temperance said, and she shifted uneasily with her bottom set to rest against the edge of the chest of drawers by the wash-stand, in her nice lady-like blue linen gown for Sunday service. “Yes. After a manner of speaking. Which is why I was interested – well, I suppose the whole college is talking about it, in fact. The whole _university_. Even though it didn't happen at _this_ college. But I did cross his path and–-.”

And she fell silent, because it was an extraordinarily difficult and awkward subject –- on the same day that a man had been found dead. And not a natural death, either. Not even a decently _non-magical_ death, either -- that would be relatively respectable, at least.

But it seemed that she'd said enough, or enough to jog Moates' memory at any rate. Because she dropped her pink duster on the floor abruptly, and put her hand to her mouth, with a comical expression of dismay and contrition. Oh hell. Even Moates had heard, then. “Oh, miss, I am sorry. No, no, let me apologise, Miss, I feel awful. You see I was away at the seaside with Arnold and the kids last week, on me holidays, and it's not as if I ever listen to the Home Service on the radio, so if I wasn't at the college while everybody was talking about it, I wasn't likely to hear about it. And I wouldn't have heard about it _at all_ once I was back, either, barring that Molly in the canteens service is an awful old gossip and always fills anyone in with everything that's been going on if they've been away. And Miss, it's not like it's got anything to do with the poor man being found dead this morning, anyway, is it?”


	5. Chapter 5

She didn't even really state it as a question, and that was a bit of a relief, frankly. Because when a man is found dead, murdered in the communal study grounds of his place of work – and even when you were solidly asleep in your bed at the time, and can prove your location and give yourself a nice staid comfortable alibi for all the hours leading up to the shocking event and discovery – well. It's still not nice, if you had a notorious public battle of words with him, the week before it happened.

And although Temperance hadn't been one bit sorry at the time, she was certainly experiencing some regrets now. Attendance at a debate specially open to the public at the Cambridge Union, on the issue of ' _This House believes that Women Should be Confined to Feminine Domains of Life Excluding the Magical'_ had been impossible to pass up. The very provocation of the subject had been catnip to any young lady attending one of the colleges, especially the new magical colleges, and the Union had been, unsurprisingly, packed to the very gills.

And not only that – as if a hefty and avid audience in person weren't enough to be going on with. But the governing council of the Union had made arrangements with the British Broadcasting Council to have the debate aired on the Empire Service on the radio. Since, it seemed, the subject was a matter of vital and urgent interest to the nation, what with a sadly depleted stock of menfolk having come back from the Magical Great War, and the colleges filling up with young ladies who since they couldn't find a man, figured they'd best get themselves a career instead. And why not a magical one, now that the occult occupations were opening up to them, due to a shortage of candidates and no shortage of need?

What with it being open to all, and on a most controversial subject besides, the audience had been packed out with local townies, and regular folks just casually interested. And not only that, but plenty of members of the university and colleges' staff, too. The St. Sibyl's Provost, Dean Saroyan, into the bargain. The two speakers arguing each side of the question, Miss Hannah Burley as a lady scholar at one of the mixed colleges, and Miss Heather Taffet, a student of theological sciences, had both done a good job putting their case, well-researched and detailed and passionate, at least on Miss Burley's side. She had a bit of a reputation in college, a second-year with a 'past' back in her home country that was whispered about and yet never adequately detailed, at least to Temperance's satisfaction.


	6. Chapter 6

(Temperance was aware that she had an innocent face, wide and pleasant and much given to pleased smiles. It seemed to cause a lot of people to feel obliged to 'protect' her from things there was no earthly need for her to be protected from, not at the advanced age of twenty, and with advanced school leaving certificates in biology. Not to mention her old uncle Laurence and his sheep farm in the wolds, where she'd seen enough goings-on and tuppings during the mating season to leave little in the way of romance or misapprehension in her mind, regarding the biological basics of copulation and reproduction.)

Taffet, though a diligent scholar and well-connected in academia, was the less impressive of the two opponents. Which was understandable, since she didn't need to be: her position was sufficiently outrageous to provide a limitless store of amusement for the audience, despite the fact that she did not appear to be playing for laughs. Temperance had met her several times at socials, and not liked her. She was a frog-faced, stocky woman in the late twenties, a vicar's brat who'd come to the college late, once her father died and ceased to block her ambitions. One might have thought the fact would cause her to sympathize with suffrage and women's education, but it appeared not. Rather, she had the reputation of regarding every other female scholar as potential competition, to be ousted by whatever means presented themselves. On this occasion she seemed to enjoy herself, courting popularity amongst the more rigid and bigoted of the menfolk, fomenting fury, and cracking politely urbane, humourless jokes, as she efficiently ran through all the points to be made to prop up a weak and specious argument.


	7. Chapter 7

Hannah Burley, on the other hand... Burley was a firebrand. Too smart, by half, to take Taffet herself seriously, either as an opponent or a potential enemy. And Temperance had witnessed them fraternising with the greatest goodwill a couple of times, at May balls and during the Boat Race. Perhaps it was a case of keeping one's enemy close.

Burley addressed Taffet's actual arguments and specific points, instead, and focused all of her attention upon the audience, both physical and via the recording equipment that was broadcasting _her message_ – as there was little doubt she thought of it – to a wider nation.

She was passionate, infuriated. An intense proselytiser for women's rights, for the right to education, to self-determination, to the choice to follow one's own true path. Even for women. (She was beautiful, too. Temperance had noticed that, all right, and she'd noticed it before that day, too.)

“Magical powers are _natural_ gifts,” she'd snapped out, fierce blue eyes flashing and her wide sensual mouth stretching, in what was technically a smile. (But actually a grimace.) “In order to restrict themselves to their 'proper' spheres, should women repress what nature has gifted them with? How then are such spheres more 'natural' for women? Who is to decide what domains and activities are properly _suitable_ for women? Oh, wait, don't tell me, because I think I can guess – men!”

Her sarcasm had been rather refreshing, a cleansing icy blast. Perhaps she was a little extreme – Temperance hadn't been able to condone or accede to her dark hints about separatism and radicalisation, if co-operation and legal procedure didn't eventually produce full equality in magical rights with men, and a full and comprehensive education for all segments of the population. But largely, and in spirit, Temperance had agreed with her. More than that, she'd been inspired, elevated. Perhaps _enchanted_ would have been the better, more accurate word. She'd felt very strange, certainly, quite hypnotised and ready to float off and disappear. Her attention was caught, she was possessed, and quite in a daze.

Very beautiful, yes. And more than once – four times, five times – Temperance had caught her eye. Or perhaps it was that she'd caught Temperance's eye. She was in such a state – a silly state – that it would have been quite difficult to say which. That had happened before now, too, seeing her around college.


	8. Chapter 8

They didn't actually know each other, had never so much as been introduced. It wasn't that they were already acquainted.

So. In any case, Temperance had been stirred up a fair way. Which probably accounted for her standing up during the question period, and putting a question for herself. It was nothing she'd normally have done, or not at this stage of her psychological development. She wasn't precisely shy nor an oddity, not the way she'd been in the first years of boarding school: she'd begun to open up and flower socially, a little, was more at ease with other people, and perhaps with herself. But she hadn't reached the point where she was comfortable with asserting herself publicly, and setting her will and her opinions against someone else's, pitting herself against them. (She was going to have to become so, she was aware, would have to find the combativeness within herself that would allow her to treat a tutorial or a seminar as a form of rough and tumble that honed academic debate, and left a winner standing above the dust and blood and raising a hand to the emperor in crude triumph. She wasn't quite there, yet, though. Or she hadn't been, until this day. _This_ debate, _this_ girl, those _eyes_.)

Yes, that was what happened, what had happened. She'd got so fired up by disagreeing – even through distaste – with Taffet. So fired up by this smirking lumpen troll of a creature – well, a bit worked up, anyway. In a bit of a _froth_ , as Mrs Lill, her parents' housekeeper in their gloomy North Lancashire village, would more likely put it. She stood up, not at the first invitation, resisting the temptation. But after a minute or two of ferocious highly civilised arguments, she couldn't hold it in any further. Had irresolutely begun to stand, a couple of times. And stopped herself, and stopped herself again.


	9. Chapter 9

Then, as she'd twisted her hands, someone had begun to argue in the opposite direction, and Miss Taffet had been eloquent. And, oh, hateful. “ _Sirs_ : Miss Burley tries to persuade us that a woman's role should encompass the magical arts, and provides in evidence the gifts that she alleges to be bestowed by the benevolence of nature and divine forces, and that therefore should not be repressed by the will of man. Well, in answer to such a farrago, it is difficult to know what to say. One presumes that Miss Burley confidently feels herself to be blessed with such marvellous properties and potentialities, that the world itself would be a sorry place if once deprived of them? Such munificence, on her part, one feels. I am left most _humbly_ speechless: beyond the observation that _Nature_ and the _Devil_ may be easily confused, and that Divine law is outside of nature – truly _super_ natural – and supervenes over any consideration of a closed system which...” Yes, that had been Taffet, the horrid, greasy little gremlin. And she was exactly that pompous and self-satisfied, ready to perorate on and on all the evening through, if she wasn't stopped.

Not that Temperance cared overmuch. If the best she could do to make any of her points was appeals to authority and divine revelation, then it barely seemed worth the trouble of contradicting her. It took more than that to induce Temperance to stand and fight her corner in a public venue. Except that then, a member of the other side of the Chamber jumped up to support Taffet. An oily youngish man, and Temp recognized him as Provost of Pembroke, Christopher Pelant. A gifted chap, by reputation. But not much liked.

There was a smirk on his face as he spoke: gazing around as if expecting applause to sweep upon him like great waves, one upon another. “And of course the common village witches and _soi-disant_ 'wise women' of previous centuries may well be disregarded, not only on account of disrespecting male authority and their proper assigned roles, required by their inferior and feminine natures, but also due to the lack of quality and intellectual rigor of their work. 'By their fruits shall ye know them', let us not forget: and I say to thee, no uneducated hedge-witch nor common lady spell-caster has ever risen to the level of skill, tenacity and dazzling brilliance of achievement of the warlockian likes of Sir Isaac Newton, say, or William of Stratford-upon-Avon, or the great Cromwell! I do not even need to list their great magical achievements for you, to prove my case that a woman-witch is not, and should not be, possessed of such skills, powers, and status within a wider magical society. It is a matter self-evident, I say to all assembled and the greater magical nation listening tonight: _women do not have the intellectual capacity for magic._ ”

And it was that, that impelled Temperance to her feet in an instant, even without knowing fully that she was about to do it. Because that was an assertion that had to be challenged, and she was the woman to do it.

And even as she opened her mouth, she was a little aware that across the chamber, Hannah Burley stood, arms folded and lips tight, and watched her _go_.

xxx

Pelant hadn't been pleased, nor impressed, and it wasn't as if she was greatly surprised by that. Red in the face, his prematurely portly belly pushing at the straining limits of his near-popping waistcoat buttons. "Young woman,” he began in response – and if he hadn't been bound by the conventions and limits of formal debate, Temperance had a strong feeling that he might have addressed her as 'Missy' - “If you seek to impress the assembled company in these revered halls by disrespecting your elders and forebears in the learned practice of magical arts and supernatural practices, you only render yourself both mannerless and ridiculous!”


	10. Chapter 10

Well, that was _her_ told, as her old north country nanny would probably have put it. And normally she might have allowed him to put her in her place: Miss Frigga's Elocutionary hadn't exactly been a hotbed of feminist radicalism. And her home-life as the only granddaughter of a Yorkshire mill magnate and a sprig of the Quaker faith, had ensured she was well schooled in what was considered appropriate feminine modesty and deference.

But his methods of debate were erroneous and dishonest, and disrespectful to her fellow female scholars. And he was appealing to _authority_. (Good God.) And he was _wrong_. Not only wrong, but _egregiously_ wrong. And the American girl was watching her, from her spot on the floor at the lectern. Watching her, to see if she would lie down and give up under this treatment.

She didn't care for the idea of Miss Burley's scorn, if she did that. The thought felt like little circling licks of flame, gently toasting her toes. “Sir,” she began coldly, and inspiration seemed to creep up on her from behind, to put its hands gently on her shoulder and to whisper in her ear. (She felt as if someone _were_ whispering in her ear.) “Sir,” she said coldly. “You refer to disrespect, while showing considerable such to women of magic – and women in general – yourself. Perhaps it might surprise even a learned man of letters such as yourself- for you are surely unaware of it – that Sir Isaac Newton, in his Principia Magica, credited the village witches of his acquaintance with his first steps in magical education, his nanny with instilling him with principles of labour and devotion, his female cousins with correcting his early magical missteps? I say I _assume_ you are unaware: since if the men of letters you reference with such devotion - such laborious attempts to place yourself in the same lineage - greatly paid due credit and respect to the magical women of their day, then perhaps you are _less_ magically learned than you consider yourself?”


End file.
